The Sky Holds No Angels
by Watermelon Sniper
Summary: They died without a sound and drowned out the din of the ship's shattering. Or, a hypothetical look into Vivi's head.


Imagine you're a little boy lost in a world created from the pages of fairy tales and fables; you've lived out your life so far in a mountain near a city trapped in everlasting midnight with your grandfather, who, though in hindsight could easily be described as a bizarre parable on gluttony and who initially took you in as a potential meal, grew to love you and care for you as his own; your first friend is, in a very real sense, a prince among thieves and a street rat. You live your life thinking you're the only sort of boy like you in the world. There comes a day, side by side with people you hope will be friends, when you believe anything is possible, but the believing doesn't quell the surprise any when you find them. Others like you. You're not alone, and suddenly you're not sure you like that anymore.

There are countless scores of them, hanging limply from tenterhooks on a manufacturing line, and they are all so very much like you and yet they're neither dead nor living. You convince yourself they're dolls - or rather you tell yourself they're dolls, but there's no one fooled and you can't stop shaking, and not even being stuffed into a coffin for the second time in one day can make you more afraid, can force a tremble into more of you than is already trembling, because suddenly you know there's a page you come from, too, a tale all your own, but it's either an instruction manual or one of the old true fairy tales, unsanitized and dark, and all you know is that this will not end well.

And then you board the cargo ship, and it takes everything you have not to cry or scream. You still can't tell if they're alive or dead, but when they won't answer you, it stings so much more. Their eyes are like yours, the color of goldenrod and glinting like heated embers, and faces veiled with unnatural shadows creeping from under almost comically tall stove top hats (you know from experience there's not much of note underneath). They move quietly and efficiently, but they might as well be ghosts for all that they seem to notice what they're doing. But you know they can think because you have to - you'd rather be insane than think otherwise - and you keep trying. And trying. Because you know what it's like to be so frightened you can't remember how to speak, and you wouldn't wish it on anyone. When the Black Waltz comes, talking about programming and acting like a stock villain from a play, your head is spinning round faster than a weekend; you decide to stop wishing. There are no angels here to grant your prayers, and if there are, they clearly think you're as much a demon as the people from Dali did.

The mages encircle you protectively as the Waltz cackles, and you've got an answer and so many more questions - you think you know - you think maybe their voices have been cut from their bodies, that maybe they just need time to learn how to live, like how babies grow into adults - but you haven't even begun to understand. It doesn't stop their deaths from running cold in your veins every time someone mentions Alexandria. There's fire and lightning and brightness and sound, and the mages are falling, every one of them, and from such a height that even if there were survivors they would wish there weren't, and it splinters something essential inside you just as if it was falling, too. You barely remember the rage in you exploding from your body to burn the Waltz, but you can still see your people falling, faces nothing but shadows, can still smell the burning. It doesn't leave you even during the times it seems everything else does, because they were dolls and they were real people, just like you, and there was so much they would never be able to experience. It wasn't right.

You see them again, briefly and repeatedly; you can see them falling in the lines etched in your palms, in the rain-soaked angles of the proud, hunted Burmecians who call you a monster. You think you can see an eerie glint like burning embers in the man named Kuja's eyes, but you close your eyes tightly against the idea until stars ignite behind your lids and you forget to think about it.

It hurts every time you see the light of a mage's eyes dim and blacken. You're young - younger than you know - and you wish you didn't have to fight. But you do, because you have to; because like everyone, you have no choice but to fight your monsters. You can't let your brothers be forgotten - and they may as well be your brothers - because the truth was there were as many angels waiting for them as the people of Alexandria, and both deserved more. Their lives were worth more than tools of war or tiny roles in a grand, overreaching story - they had as many possibilities as any person, and they were so alive.

(You think about Kuja, and they way he talked about the black mages as though you were worth exactly that little, ice and fire wild in your veins, and you remember thinking that if the world stopped making any sort of literary sense, maybe you wouldn't mind at all.)

You remember asking the girl Dagger who was once the princess Garnet, after she had renamed herself, "Can a name really change you so much?"

And her reply was automatic, like she'd told herself the same enough times before and would again; "I am the seventeenth Princess Garnet Til Alexandros. I must believe I can reinvent myself, or I fear I might just end up just another Garnet."

And when someone asks you why you fought though you were only a child down the line, you will remember it all - those first mages who tumbled from the sky protecting you, how Kuja hadn't cared if he pulled the mages' strings or cut them, how Dagger, Zidane, Steiner, and everyone else made you realize how little the differences were between the world as it was and your own - and you won't need to think about what you will answer. You will answer one thing, and it will be the complete truth: "Because I had to believe it all meant something."


End file.
